The present study will investigate three categories of emotion management skills (i.e., emotion encoding and decoding, emotional understanding, emotion regulation) in physically maltreating and nonmaltreating families. Forty physically maltreating mothers (as well as available maltreating fathers) and their children will be recruited for participation from parenting programs for maltreating parents. Parents in the maltreatment group must have had a report for physical abuse of the child that was substantiated by Children's Protective Services in the previous 9 months. The physical maltreatment group will be compared to a control group matched on child age, child gender, and race as well as socioeconomic status. Parents and children will complete a two hour data collection session in which they will be administered a parent-child interaction task, a task that measures understanding of nonverbal emotion signals (e.g., facial expression, voice tone), an emotion regulation interview, and several questionnaires designed to measure emotion management skills in order to examine: (a) whether maltreated children exhibit different emotion management strategies than their nonmaltreated peers, (b) whether maltreating parents socialize emotion management skills differently than nonmaltreating parents, and (c) whether relations exists between parental behaviors (e.g., discussion of emotionally-arousing situations) and children's emotion management skills. Information on the nature of the physical maltreatment (e.g., severity and duration of abuse) will be obtained from Children's Protective Services. Data will be analyzed using MANOVAIANOVA, Mixed-Model, and correlational analyses. From a developmental psychopathology perspective (Cicchetti & Toth, 1995), findings from this study will enable us to identify factors in emotional development that may underlie maltreated children's risk for adaptational failures in development (e.g., peer rejection, child psychopathology), while providing information about the role that parent-child interaction may play in the development of children's socioemotional competence. This information will enhance our ability to develop effective intervention programs for physically maltreating families.